Damien is a Developer Evangelist at Splunk which involves developing big data solutions atop the Splunk platform and then engaging with the developer community to help grow the Splunk developer ecosystem.Prior to joining Splunk he spent the bulk of his career cutting code and architecting solutions for many different industry verticals around the world.His core background is computer science, and is attracted to projects that embody simplicity, open standards & community collaboration.When not pushing, pulling and forking he likes to get amongst the fish and scuba dive, bring shock and awe to the golf course and make loud noises with his guitar collection.

So we have arrived in the era of "Big Data". But what is all this data, where has it come from, and how can we use it. In this session we'll go on journey through time to try and understand a bit about the origins of the data age we are in, the variety of data we have available to us today and what tools and techniques developers can use to leverage this tremendous resource.